The People Behind Conservation Travel: Edward Tucker Brown

As travellers increasingly seek more meaningful journeys, this series is designed to help luxury travel advisors connect that desire with the conservation stories, landscapes and exceptional properties that define conservation-led travel across Africa and Madagascar.

Travel is shaped as much by the people we meet as by the places we visit. From time to time, we will introduce some of the remarkable people working behind the scenes to make conservation travel possible—and share stories that can help bring their properties to life for clients.

Inspiration

Welsh-born Edward Tucker Brown—Edd—grew up in Dubai and Kuwait, exploring wide-open deserts and wondering what might be waiting beyond the next sand dune.

That childhood freedom never quite left him. After travelling overland from London to Cape Town at 18 and building a career in African tourism, he arrived in Madagascar with an idea: to recreate the adventure of reaching places previously accessible only to backpackers—but in comfort.

Luck

Then came a barbecue.

Edd mentioned his plans to another guest, who told him he had to visit Ifotaka. Edd went, fell in love with its extraordinary spiny and gallery forests, and established what would become Mandrare River Camp.

By another stroke of luck, a Peace Corps volunteer trained in ecotourism was already living in the village and could begin making introductions.

Sometimes conservation travel starts with a grand vision. Sometimes it starts with the right conversation beside a barbecue.

Relationships

Trust, however, took rather longer. Local residents could not quite believe that foreigners had travelled halfway around the world simply to look for mouse lemurs and sportive lemurs in the forest at night.

For three years, someone from the community accompanied every excursion, presumably waiting to discover what the visitors were really doing. Eventually, the conclusion was reached: strange as it seemed, they genuinely were just looking at lemurs.

Those relationships became the foundation of MCC. Some of Edd’s earliest employees remain with the company today.

Patrick began in the kitchen, became an exceptional chef and now leads operations across the portfolio—although guests are in for a particular treat if he feels inspired to return to the stove.

Staying Power

Edd describes the early years as a mixture of “necessity, want and willpower.” He ran the camp, reservations and logistics himself, survived a political coup, the collapse of tourism and, later, COVID.

Through it all, the underlying idea continued to grow: that carefully managed tourism could create livelihoods while giving communities a tangible reason to protect the forests around them.

Today, that belief supports conservation work on an entirely different scale. But behind the programmes and impressive numbers is still the same instinct: go beyond the next sand dune, see what might be there—and then do everything possible to help it endure.